The House of Writers

by M. J. Nicholls

  Mhairi

  6

  MY residence on The House roof is a large rectangular shedcum-house (a shouse) containing my bed, two chillout chairs with tiger-skin wraparounds, and my collection of fortune-bearing talismans. These items were discovered at various Highland locations when my parents moved around the country selling vacuum bags, and I have placed them at strategic places in the room due to my superstitious nature. These include: a severed marmot’s foot from Thurso; a poster of a right-wing shepherd from Castletown; an inkblot test resembling the constellation Orion from Braes of Harrow; the diseased bowel of an Angus cow from Dunnet Head; a preserved sprig of a Pictish radish from John O’Groats; a facsimile of unpublished Rabbie Burns poem “Oh! Midges!” from Tongue Wood; a scale model of a Victorian “field of sheds” from Wick; a jar of wandering hydrogen from Borgie Forest; a hygiene wipe signed “To Lydia, I implore you to reconsider, Love Baz” from Loch Lucy; a tapestry criticising the art of tapestries from Altnabreac; a sketch of former boxer Mike Tyson from Helmsdale; a vial of an unidentified liquid believed to be an unguent used to cure Orcadian colic from Dornach; a sprig of heather sprouting through a frog’s corpse from Brora; an instruction manual on how to cheer tenebrous sheep from Golspie; the keys to a Rover 50 parked precariously on a cliff-edge from Lairg; a thistle boiled in milk and strained through a washerwoman’s tights from Alness; the syllabus of a small press founded on the Isle of Bute, consisting of two texts, Robert Alan Jamieson’s Soor Hearts and Philip K. Dick’s Ubik from Tain; the spare tyre of a JCB hauler from Evanton. These items, although causing considerable clutter and requiring storage outside the shouse, perform important functions to sate my superstitious nature. The shouse was constructed by Gerald, about whom I will write in my next installment.

  I said thanks Mum

  MY mum suggested I sign up for The House of Writers because I wrote stories about horses and chairs and things so I said good idea. I didn’t want to do it alone however so I suggested she come with me and she agreed. She said she would help me with the writing and manage the financial side so I didn’t have to think about practical worries. I said thanks Mum. The best thing for me to write was erotica so she signed me up to that floor and bought me a desk where I could work and write prose for the readers. At first I was confused about what I was supposed to be writing but Mum filled me in and explained that erotica was a genre that dealt with sexual intercourse between two human beings. So I set about writing scenes of sexual intercourse between men and men and women and women and the variations of sexual possibility that exist in the world and showed the first draft to Mum. She said the descriptions of rimming and fellatio were not adequate so she suggested I add more description about the tongue working the rim of the cockshaft and made tongue movements to demonstrate. I said thanks Mum. I had written a novel containing two adventurous lovemakers who take pleasure making love in public places with an especial focus on oral activities involving the intake of seminal fluid. Mum was proud. I made four pounds on the first book and this gave me enthusiasm to continue with the next. I wrote a tribadic erotic tale this time featuring four women who like making love to each other in train stations. Mum criticised the scenes of anal penetration with dildos and suggested I emphasise the strain taken on the buttocks when the lubricated dildos were being inserted via the rectum. She pulled down her underpants and demonstrated the difficulty of inserting a rigid item into that orifice by forcing a stapler between her wide-open buttocks. I said thanks Mum.

  Cal’s Tour

  Romance

  EVERY clichéd impression you may have of romance novelists is surpassed when you step into the dense fog of pinkness that is the fifth floor. Scented smoke puffs from two pipes, coating the foyer in a candyfloss mist. You inhale the scent and choke your way along the corridor, past barely perceptible posters of catalogue model hunks and swooning heroines, towards a large room dolled up like an extravagantly cheap hotel. Four ladies in their late fifties with caked-on makeup sit writing beside perfume dispensers, puffing a peachy fragrance into the air every few minutes—a heady bordello scent—and will either leap up to meet you or barely grant you a careless peep, as is their wont. They told me their names, annexed my body, and enclosed me in a peach-scented hug. Over Bertie’s shoulder, I saw Tina’s daughter Oh, a dowdy beanpole cowering in the corner whom I had mistaken for a hat stand. She was one fifteenth the body mass of her mother, as though made from one of her ribs, and stood in a stylishly sulky teapot stance watching without expression as my lungs were cleared of breath. I surrendered to the cushiony heft of their arms and bosoms. As they turned to plant a sequence of unsolicited pecks on my cheeks, their shrapnelly eyelashes scraped my ears and scalp, and when the sequence of slurpy mwah-mwahs had ended, my cheeks were a painter’s palette of reds and pinks. “Aren’t you a big plate of cuteness on rye with salami, soybeans, and peppermint jalapeños?” Bertie asked. “He’s a bowl of unmitigated loveliness with extra pastrami and coochie-croutons,” Tina countered. “No he’s not!” Cassie almost shouted. “He’s a serving of xylophone meat with tuba crackers, cor anglais nachos, trumpet lettuce, horn radish, oboe lemons, fiddle rice, violin turkeys, harmonium dips, and double bass pudding.” An awkward pause followed as Cassie sank back to her desk, having overdone it again.

  Horror struck when Bertie asked me to massage her bunions in exchange for my room and board. I reverted to my cute simper, assuming “cheeky chuckles” were underway. Jaulopie peeled off her sock and Tina nodded towards the exposed feet and their unfortunate blemishes in need of kneading by the nubile newbie, i.e. me. To refuse my fingers after the extravagant and creepy praise they had heaped on me would have been churlish. I squirmed footwards. They were, after all, only a pair of human feet. The purple nail polish on each toe hiding the fungus behind her cracked nails was not so revolting as to merit the queasiness and disgust on my face, nor were the inflamed blisters of pus I was stroking and poking sufficiently horrifying to merit my escaping into a daydream and trying psychological blocking techniques. Jaulopie flung her head back in delirium at my touch and I closed my eyes, returning to the inverted vortex and its fleeting happiness. Oh looked on with an amused expression, no doubt finding my torture a hoot. “That is spanky-doodle-candy, my young tootsie-tapper,” Jaulopie said as I massaged. “That feels like heaven brought to my bunions.” When my ordeal was over—depression slowly rising—I was taken to the sleeping area by Bertie. My room was free from the tyranny of pink décor, although numerous hunky lummoxes were plastered up on the walls, some of whom were damp with saliva from fresh morning licks. “Sorry about that. A few of the girls were having a lick earlier. The sheets might also be damp and need a wash. See you out there, cutie-poke.” As you can imagine, you need pailfuls of patience on this floor.

  The next day, Tina shook me awake for the first day of my apprenticeship—entering the room without knocking and stealing some feels of my naked chest while I was too zonked to protest or feel sexually threatened. I was taken to a small tea room, free from pinks but dotted with doilies, where the ladies, slap-less and deeccentricised, all chatted in shy and normal tones. They discussed their writing for the day like people who resembled real people, showing little sign of yesterday’s cartoon lunacy. Jaulopie was working on a story about an attractive lawyer with a prosthetic penis who serendipitously bumps into an attractive attorney with a prosthetic vagina. The two are finally able to dock due to both prosthetics being compatible with Shinoba V46 models. One of the readers is a fetishist for prosthetics, so they had chosen indulge her particular whims that month.

  One condition of their employment is that they “behave like psycho-sassy spinsters, dress like a cartload of Cartlands invading Scotland, and be somewhat unhinged but still able to prose.” So every night after work, they remove their makeup and retreat into their usual selves. They took me to the makeup room: a sterile pink zone more like an operating theatre, where four hairdryers with robot beauticians sit against a wall, the makeup and imp
lements sprawled on a metal table in front. The ladies sit reading as the sharp-clawed robots set to work spreading on the slap, sharpening up the lashes, tinting the hair, and rouging up cheeks and nails. A second procedure is required for the mascara and lipstick. The former is pounded in a pestle and roasted until ash-crisp, applied while hot and flaming slightly along the tungsten lashes, while the latter is whisked and whirred to a gelatinous texture, made to leave perfect kiss-prints on a victim’s cheeks. I was spared the full makeover, but a little blusher to redden up my cheeks was applied, followed by a trip to the dressing room, where a range of frilly frocks were available on a long monorail of embarrassment. I raked through the flowery dresses, skirts, and blouses, looking for the least unflattering ensemble possible, choosing a purple blouse with yellow sunflower pattern and a dark green skirt with strawberries arranged in a zigzag sequence. If I pulled up my blue, kitty-riddled socks, my ankles were fully covered, meaning I didn’t have to wax them. Next, I selected a wig to wear, choosing a shoulder-length dark-red bob, and practiced walking in my high heels, moving from the door to the mirror.

  Another stipulation of their contract is that every morning they kneel before a small shrine where a collage of fascists from days of yore—Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Robert Mugabe, Tony Blair—is pasted up for a reverential morning prayer. They kneel, clasp hands, and recite: “To these fine men, misunderstood by history’s betrayers, we offer our respect, and ask that whoever is guiding us look upon their visionary ways with infinite humility and love. Amen and all that.” I echoed their words, staring into the avuncular moustache of the smirking Joseph Stalin. I never fully understood this ritual.

  As a (practicing) professional, I rose above the setbacks to deliver my novel on schedule. A thriving market of eleven readers commission the books: an après-sexual cult of subversives who prefer using their imaginations to induce lubricity, shunning the 49,000 pornographic networks widely available and favoured by the populace for mindless autoerotic relief. These eleven had arrived at a point—raised on easy access to hardcore Dutch, replacing sexual relationships with double-daily masturbation to hardcore pornography—where they found themselves incapable of a tender thought expressed towards another human being, and later, any arousal at artistic erotica. The only solution for them was to boycott their porn and revert back to the imagination, to softcore suggestion and tame romance, where sexual acts lurked below the merest hint of the existence of genitals. Occasional perversions and requests for hotter matter crept into their commissions. The intended endpoint of these books was an entirely chaste form of romantic writing dating back to the sexlessness of the pre-Victorians, where corseted repressions helped nurture real unquenchable lusts and proper passions, and the slow return of the readers’ emotional sensitivities might lead to meaningful relationships based on love and tenderness, if they could find anyone else on the planet who still had these qualities, or bring themselves to pair off with each other (the eleventh person being a sacrificial celibate). Fortunately for the department, by the time this happened, the readers would be well into their sixties, theoretically beyond the point where they were likely to have sexual relationships anyway, and would have to make do with yearly masturbation to alleviate the tinglings.

  Strange things happened to me during my time there. I saw the monkey who was kept captive down in the basement (with the experimentalists) toddling up the stairs, whistling to itself while carrying a handful of papers and skim-reading. Upon seeing me, he dropped the papers and faked simian behaviour, knuckle-walking up the steps, swinging his arms around, making exaggerated gurning motions with his chin. He tried to brush past me and quickly clamber on his way, but I seized his arm. The monkey looked affronted and faltered for a response. “What’s with the proper walking?” I asked. “Ooh-wah-wah-wah-ah!” the monkey said, throwing his arms around and patting himself on the head. “Stop that,” I said. “Ooh-wah-wah-wah-wah!” he insisted. “You were walking upright and whistling. You’ve been rumbled.” The monkey lowered his arms and regained his proper posture. He ushered me closer with a small index twitch. “All right, but you have to keep shtum. I’m not in this to be outed. Bryswine thinks I’ve been writing the complete works of Shakespeare for his nutso project, but I’ve secretly been typing up my own novels and printing them off on the sly. Since you humans dropped the ball, we in the simian species have evolved an interest in literature. You remember all those books that were recycled into bedding for cages in zoos, those books you air-dumped into the rainforest? That’s where it all began, my sapien friend. On boring nights we’d read passages of Eliot and Clarkson and pretty soon we evolved into semi-intelligent beings. But if we ever go public, the humans will confiscate our books and have us liquidised, probably, seeing us a ‘threat’ or whatever to their supremacy as a species or whatever, you know what they’re like. While you homos were setting up call centres, we kept our adorable monkey heads down, reading and reading. Some of us developed artistic ambitions, working with humans in the hope we could find materials with which to write our books. I was extremely fortunate to have escaped the Crarsix Zoo and be adopted by one of the experimental writers. My works are the most widely read among simians.” I was stunned! “My God, I had no idea. How have you managed to remain undetected for so long?” He coughed. “Human stupidity. At some point, we will rise up and overtake your species. All we need is some training to develop our upper body strength, and we should be able to slowly insinuate ourselves into the power structure. We will be kind to the humans who mean well. We will have lovely zoos for you to play in. The rest will, naturally, be dispatched to our old homes in the rainforest. Estimated date for this takeover ... about three years? Could be quicker if they keep pulping law books and encyclopaedias. Don’t worry. We simians have learned from the stupidities of your species, we hope to practice benevolence, charity, and love, as opposed to human virtues: avarice, selfishness, warfare, meatheadedness, cold-blooded brutality, idiocy, sexual depravity, carelessness and spineless brainlessness.” Well, what can you say to that?

  Trying to write in that office with the banter at full blitz—non sequiturs, stinging sallies, and potent prattle filling your ears with distracting fuzz—is insufferable. However, I did complete my sensual romance. Here is a chapter to whet your understanding:

  Axis turned to Donna with his chest rippling. She had never seen a chest like his ripple before, and had an instant craving for raspberry ripple ice-cream. “Hang ten, pussycat,” she said, heading for the kitchen. She returned with a tub of ice-cream and applied it to his chest. Axis flinched at the cold and moaned as Donna licked the cream off his nipples. “Hang ten again,” she said, heading for the kitchen. She returned with a biscuit and crushed it between her fingers, sprinkling the crumbs along his chest and licking them off. “Ooh, also—” she said, heading for the kitchen. Axis sighed with impatience. He was ready to go off at any moment. She returned with strawberries, and placed one on in his navel, taking it whole in her mouth. “Actually know what? I haven’t eaten today, hold on baby—” she said, heading etc. She returned with a pack of sliced beef, tinned roast potatoes, and a tub of Moroccan couscous. She draped a slice of beef over his beef and forked some couscous into his navel. “Lie back so I can eat properly,” she said. She placed a potato on his chest and picked up her fork and knife, slicing the potato in half and working on the beef—Axis wincing as the knife nicked his skin. She took the beef and potato in her mouth, licked up some couscous, and moaned her yums. “Oh wonder if my show is on now,” she said, reaching for the TV remote. She turned on the TV and watched Susie’s Soups, a cooking show with emphasis on soups made by Susie. “Ooh, I want to make this! Hang ten, let me rustle up the ingredients!” she said. “Please don’t make it on my chest,” Axis protested.

  —Hunk Soup, p.790

  A Word from the Team

  OH: We specialise in romantic stories involving beefcakes with enormous ones who use them to superhuman effect. Some of the variants i
nclude those with prosthetic limbs in lust, goitres or excessive swellings in lust, distended or missing toes and feet in lust, dwarves or giants in lust, completely flattened (or 2D) people in lust, and terminal patients in lust. We need whole novels written quickly (one fortnight per novel) for our readers—attentiveness to spelling and grammar not important, though no illiterates please.